Hello. I full-heartedly greet all of you, and I congratulate you as true Americans, as the true representatives of the Republic of America, which has its 250th birthday today. And I want to thank in particular you, Diane, for running as an independent presidential candidate representing the vision and the program of my late husband Lyndon LaRouche, and for having organized this event, which, without any exaggeration, is for sure one of the handful of outstanding celebrations upholding the true principles of the American Revolution and that in an ocean of travesties and banalizations of that historic watershed. To set the record straight of what this American Revolution was and what happened to its tradition and memory, in order to revive its principles not only for the United States but for the entire world, we are conducting this event today.
And indeed, the revival of the principles of the American Revolution, or the effort to try to do so, comes not one moment too early, because the world is truly on the edge of the abyss. The danger of a global nuclear war has never been so close—much more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis—with two regional theaters of war in danger of spinning out of control. The world as it was created in large part also by the United States in the post-war period, the period of the Cold War, when there were two blocs, and the post-Cold War order, all of this has disintegrated. The attempt to create an unipolar world order, the illusion that the United States could forever be the world hegemon, which in reality was from the beginning based on the Anglo-American special relationship, suffered a gigantic blowback. As a result, the world is now in complete disarray and chaos. The famous quote by President Trump that international law is not needed, has indeed helped to shatter the entire order.
Now, the problem is that when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, it did so amazingly peacefully, no tanks, no shooting, just a transformation with little incidents, but essentially peaceful, including the German unification. I don’t think anybody believes that if the United States would disintegrate, which it is very close to indeed, in terms of the financial bubble blowing out, I do not think that the United States would dissolve equally peacefully as the Soviet Union did. So therefore, the candidacy of you, Diane, is of the utmost strategic importance.
Now, the big question many, many people are asking themselves, in part desperately around the world is, where is there a way out? Because the role and the future of the United States is the most important, maybe the only important factor, maybe one of the most important factors to decide this question. Now, on the 14th of April of this year, an open letter was published in response to the renewed, unprovoked war of aggression against Iran by the U.S. and Israel, which was signed by many excellent people. Many of them have been working with us in the IPC and whose moral and intellectual integrity is without any doubt. The text goes in part, “To the peoples of the world, to thinkers, to scholars, and to those who believe in justice. For 249 years, spanning the entirety of its existence since 1776, the United States built a record of atrocity that belonged to a darker, pre-civilized age. The predatory empire erected on the corpses of nations from the genocide of nearly 5 million indigenous people, to the brutal enslavement of 4 million Africans, to the lynching of more than 4,000 black citizens under Jim Crow.” Well, if that orientation, calling it the entirety of its existence, were accurate, then there would be very little hope for the planet, if any at all.
The problem is that the real history of America is not known. There was a recent poll by the Cato Institute, which admittedly is not exactly a humanist institution, but nevertheless, they found in this poll that only 39% of Generation Z linked the celebration to the Declaration of Independence. Nearly half, 46% of the entire population, did not know what the 250th birthday is actually celebrating. 53% linked it to the Declaration of Independence, however. 77% knew that George Washington was the first President, but 58% said that they do not know what the main purpose of the U.S. Constitution is all about.
Now, these figures are probably worse for the two houses of Congress, because otherwise it would not have been possible that they gave 12 standing ovations to King Charles when he recently addressed the two houses of the Congress. He claimed that American constitutionalism grew out of an older Anglo-British constitutional tradition; and even if he did not mention the philosophers, it was clear who were behind the argument—John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Mandeville, and others. Though King Charles just stole the entire American history, he ironed out the American Revolution altogether, and these Congressmen and Senators did not even realize it.
Now, I want to state here in all clarity, because this is not a self-evident truth, unfortunately, that the American Revolution was an absolute break with the oligarchic system of Europe at the time, with the monarchies, with feudalism. And if you look at the long arc of human history, I would compare it not with the first landing on the moon by the Apollo mission in 1969, but an event a little bit earlier, the ascent of Yuri Gagarin, when on the 12th of April 1961, he left Earth for the first time for 108 minutes. It was the first step of mankind into space. And this was a total revolution, because it was not clear before if the human body could cope with weightlessness, and if the technology to lift man into space would actually function.
Now, the Declaration of Independence is in that sense a revolutionary non-linear phase shift. And even if it was mentioned already, let me repeat again, in the Declaration of Independence it says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. And whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its power in such form as to them shall seem the most likely to affect their safety and happiness.”
This was an absolute watershed. The idea that all men are created equal, that they have God-given unalienable rights, that government is legitimate only with the consent of the governed, was regarded as a complete outrage. Most accounts of the American Revolution only mention that it was somehow about tea and taxes and that the Americans wanted to take the rightful income away from the British. No, it was the first time that the sovereign was we, the people. For the British colonial powers, this was an absurd idea.
Tony Chaitkin, whom we will hear from in a little while, quotes in his book Who We Are, the British response which was an answer to the Declaration of the American Congress, namely a four-page essay written by Jeremy Bentham, who became in the following years the most important intelligence operative for Lord Shelburne, who was later the British Prime Minister from 1782 to 1783. Bentham called their theory of government absurd and visionary. He wrote, “What they call self-evident truth, all men, they tell us, are created equal. This rarity is a new discovery. Now for the first time we learn that a child at the moment of its birth has the same quantity of natural power as the parent, the same quantity of political power as the magistrate.”
Now the reason for this historical reaction was that the Declaration of Independence went at the core of the oligarchical imperial and colonial system. When all men are created equal, then there is nobody who is a king or a princess or a lord or an earl or any other of these superfluous positions. The whole idea of nobility is not just a matter of opinion. The idea was that most people are slaves, underlings, subjects, and that only the nobility has privileges, that the whole society is organized in such a way as to serve the privileges of a few. Now Joseph de Maistre, who was a writer for the oligarchy in the 19th Century, basically had the most outrageous description in his letter to a Russian prince. He wrote that nobility is the only ones who are good by nature, they have God-given rights, while the masses are evil. They tend to commit crimes and therefore must be controlled and suppressed by a strong state run by the monarchy. He famously said that the executioner is the actual fundament of the order of society.
Now the problem is, people do not appreciate what a watershed the American Revolution really was because they are not educated in history. And that they are not educated is intentional, because if people don’t know history, they can’t judge the present. Until the 15th Century, maybe all over the world, but for sure in Europe, all forms of government were oligarchical; that is, that only a small elite had their privileges and they kept the masses of people deliberately backward because the more stupid people were, the easier it would be to run the government. It was actually an enormous and long and difficult process of shedding that system of oligarchy and arriving at the nation-state, establishing sovereignty. It actually took centuries before, out of these supranational structures of empire such as the Roman Empire and the papacy, came a long and very tedious evolution then to the notion of the sovereign state.
This happened politically for the first time in France with the government of Louis XI from 1461 to '83, and in that reign of Louis XI, the income of the population in 20 years actually doubled. Now, at the same time, there was Nicolaus of Cusa, who is without any question the greatest thinker of the 15th Century. His revolutionary writings in many fields, in natural science, in law, in philosophy, actually mark the beginning of modern times. And his first major work was the Concordantia Catholica. Now, in Book 2, Chapter 14, he wrote—and the headline of that chapter is, “The Basic Ideas,” which contain the basic ideas which later come out in the Declaration of Independence. The headline is, “All legislation is based on natural law. Since by nature we are all equally free, all coercive power is derived from the election and consent of the subjects. The jurisdiction such created is not valid in itself unless it is in accordance with the law and the canon. For since we are all by nature free, every governance, whether it consists in a written law or is a living law in the person of a prince, by which subjects are compelled to abstain from evil deeds and their freedom directed towards the good through fear of punishment, can only come from the agreement and consent of the subjects. For if by nature men are created equal in power and are equally free, the true properly ordered authority of one common ruler who is their equal in power cannot be naturally established except by the election and consent of the others, and law is established by consent.”
Now this was an absolute revolution. This was the first time this was written in such clarity, and it is one of these watersheds. Because without Nicolaus having said these things and written them down, the long road to the American Declaration of Independence would have been impossible. He continues that idea in Book 3 of the Concordantia and in Chapter 4 where the idea of the representative system of government appears for the first time.